The invention relates generally to computer systems, and more particularly to the input of data into a computer system.
Small, mobile computing devices such as personal desktop assistants, including hand-held and palm-size computers and the like, are becoming important and popular user tools. In general, they are becoming small enough to be extremely convenient while consuming less and less battery power, and at the same time becoming capable of running more powerful applications.
Although such devices continue to shrink in size, size limitations are being reached as a result of human limitations. For example, a full character keyboard that enables user data input cannot be so small that human fingers cannot depress the individual keys thereon. As a result, such devices (e.g., palm-size computers) may eliminate the full size physical keyboard and provide a representation of a keyboard on touch-sensitive display. To this end, the user enters characters by touching the screen with a stylus at locations corresponding to the displayed keys. Of course, touch-screen devices can also be used simultaneously with devices having physical keyboards, whereby characters can also be entered by manually pressing the keys of the physical keyboard.
While a touch-screen device serves to provide a suitable means of user data entry, data entry panels and the keys displayed thereon are typically very small, which slows down user data entry and leads to erroneous data input. One way in which the individual keys may be made larger is to distribute the keys among various selectable keyboards according to some logical distinction, e.g., one keyboard for entering alphabetic characters, one for entering numeric characters and another for entering punctuation symbols. This may help by increasing key size, but potentially requires the user to do a lot of switching between the keyboards, and to hunt among the multiple keyboards for a desired character. For example, proper sentences include punctuation, however to include a complete set of alphabetic and punctuation symbols on a single displayed keyboard would render the keys on typical palm-size computers too small for most users.
Briefly, the present invention provides a method and mechanism for dynamically adjusting the meaning and the appearance of one or more dynamic keys on a displayed keyboard in response to a user""s predicted need therefor. For example, a single dynamic key may change to a different punctuation symbol in response to predicted grammatical need, at times being a hyphen and at other times being an apostrophe. To this end, a display provides a representation of a keyboard having at least one dynamic key thereon, and a sensor detects user-activity on the keyboard, e.g., taps on a touch-sensitive display. A conversion mechanism converts the detected user-activity to an appropriate character, supplies the character to a prediction engine, and in response, receives a predicted next character. Depending on the predicted next character, the dynamic key may have its meaning and displayed representation changed.
Other advantages will become apparent from the following detailed description when taken in conjunction with the drawings, in which: